Gamasutra has an extraordinary feature up on their site which covers the publicly available development contract between Spark (the developer) and publisher Activision on the game "Call of Duty: The Finest Hour".
The circumstances for this entire document being available to the public has been due to the legal battle between Spark and Activision, and it's an extremely rare look into the "typical" agreements and terms (including information on milestone payments etc) that a developer and publisher make in the games industry. As with most legal documents, it's quite an exhaustive read, but Gamasutra have secured three leading game attorneys to comment on the contract, and they do a great job at outlining some of the incredible terms and provisions the contract is agreed upon...
Chris & Dave: Activision can reject a milestone if the milestone doesn't conform to the specifications, or if it is "unacceptable for some other reason" (section 6.2(c)). In effect, this means that Activision can re-write the specifications throughout the development process. Publishers generally given themselves this ability to ensure they get the game they want.
My god - talk about developer centric and insulated commentary? You think that because you meet the exact spec of the milestone, that the delivery is ok - and say deliver with big bugs (not mentioned in the milestone) or if some of the textures have masking issues (also not often mentioned in milestones?).
Get a grip. it takes two to tango, and many times developers often do the above. Why should publishers not have the right to control the content and such? its _their_ game, they are paying for ALL of it. As developers, you are just like builders, make sure the house meets spec, and there are no little 'gotchas' and everyone will be happy.
I wish people would quit trying to find publishers as the "big evil nasty ones". With what I have seen in the game dev industry (esp in Aus) I'd think the developers have alot of explaining to do - not unlike the building industry here either.
I'm making a guess that when you say the above commentary was developer centric and insulated, you're referring to what I quoted, and not my commentary, since I don't think what I wrote was too developer centric at all.
Now that's out of the way, I must say that what I got out of all this isn't entirely of the whole "publishers are nasty" vibe, but that development contracts really need to be solid and detailed, and that nothing is ever left gaping open for huge potential gotchas like those outlined by those game attorneys on that document.
You're right Souri, everything should be very clear. Unfortunately, sometimes you do need to take the approach of guessing which elements are going to be important and honing in on those as otherwise the contract would never get done... Not just a game biz issue, just biz in general...